Thankfulness, and the husband

While Thanksgiving has passed, I think Christmas is prime-time for thankfulness…baby Jesus just makes you want to get all soft and gooey this time of year!  I’ve also been “told” I should get more personal on the blog, help potential clients and readers know who I am.  But then I feel all nervous and jittery when I start trying to come up with something clever or witty, because truthfully internet?  This part, the blogging part (outside of the yummy pictures I get to post part) is oh-so-painfully-hard for me!  I don’t know why!  In person, its easy to relate and talk, and be over-animated with hand gestures (I’m told I do that too).  But blogging is just, well, awkward.  So, I’m going  to try, and if you hang with me for more than just the pretty pictures, you are a SAINT…..I tell ya, a SAINT!

So, night before last, I watched this new show called “Find My Family” tivoed in case I could not stand the lack of new shows after the week of “finale’s” (must be nice to have so many weeks off, TV stars).  Anyway, this show stirred me all up, daughters finding mothers after being adopted, fathers finding sons after having them taken and adopted out as babies….I am not to embarrassed to admit the tears were popping up all over the place.  Then I look around the living room to see if anybody see’s what a SAP I am, hello one-year-old looking at me like I’m an alien.

I have heard we look for people in our lives, particularly our spouses, who either perpetuate a loss/pain or heal it.  We just do, and then when I heard Oprah said it too, so it must be so.  And here is the Thankfulness part.  I spent years upon years of my young life hoping to get a phone call from a father who left when I was a year old and never looked back.  Birthdays, I waited for cards or a call that never showed, looking past the balloons sprinkled around the kitchen to the door when I turned 4,  just in case.  Christmases every year, a little secret part of me wondered “HOW could you not call.  Not even once?  Not even a card?”  Now that I have my own children, I look at my beautiful, precious girls and I cannot help but wonder….what must happen to a soul, to turn and never look back?  I can remember peering outside my window in my jammies, my bears under my arms and nosed pressed against the glass,  squinting at the end of the drive…I wanted to catch the first glimpse of him driving up.   And wondering why he never did.

I have a father who adopted and raised me with my mother, I was loved, am loved, and for that?  I’m incredibly thankful. What an undertaking!  God was watching out for me.  Does it mean I don’t think about those things most people with two parents (whether together or not) take for granted?…to look into eyes you know your are just like, or a feeling of history and understanding of where and who you came from.  But then, I have always had a heavenly Father who gave me more understanding of who I am, than any earthly father possibly could.  And then there is my husband.  Clearly, a gift.  And clearly, my way of healing old wounds.  He is stable, and loyal, and unconditionally loving, and an example of Christ to me…and this has given me freedom.  And for that I am blessed and forever thankful!  Can’t wrap that up and put it under the tree, but what a GIFT I have been given!  And in honor of him, and the father that he is,  here is a pic we took from our own family session this past month (more to come!) of him and our girls…. This picture just makes me SMILE (even though they were clearly fed up with mommy and her camera and this entire torturous situation)!  Merry Christmas!  Remember the ways, far deeper than the gifts under the tree, that you too have been blessed this season…